Behavior prediction software company Behavio now part of Google

Behavio, a company that works on prediction software, on Friday announced it is now part of Google.

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TechCrunch says this wasn’t an “acquisition or an acqui-hire,” and the company doesn’t mention in its short announcement any details related to a Google purchase.

It’s not clear what Behavio and Google will work in the future, although Google Now looks like a mobile product that could benefit from this buyout/partnership.

What Behavio’s software does is to gather data from all sorts of phone sensors, including “physical location, speed, contacts, nearby devices and events, sound levels, phone activity” in order to predict behavior. Apparently the software can “target and analyze entire communities of groups of people at events,” according to Android Community.

Behavio was built on top of open source project Funf, an “extensible sensing and data processing framework for mobile devices.”

While this may sound scary to some of you, it’s certainly something that companies like Google could be interested in, as that kind of software would help it provide new mobile-related features to consumers, including improving Google Now, but also serve better ads to customers. After all, it’s with ads that Google is making its money for now.

To better understand how this technology works, check out the video below, in which potential applications for Behavio are described. Some of them are quite interesting, as Behavio technology could be used for medical purposes and have various disaster relief-related applications.

The Behavio message posted on the company’s website doesn’t share many details on what the team will work on together with Google and we can only speculate at this time. However, the team did mention that it will be shutting down its closed alpha program, although it will continue to “maintain the Funf open source project.”